The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, nurtured for so many years by ASO Music Director Robert Shaw, plays an important role in Britten's War Requiem, singing the words of the traditional Latin mass for the dead.

Baritone Stephen Powell also sings Owen's poetry. Much of the Requiem's power lies in the contrast between the old and impersonal language of the Latin mass and the shocking directness of Owen's non-sentimental English language poetry.

Tenor Thomas Cooley, who sang evocatively with great clarity, was called upon to fill in with just 48 hours notice. He sings the clear-eyed poetry of Wilfred Owen, an English poet and soldier who died in World War I just a few days before the armistice.

Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Music Director Robert Spano takes Benjamin Britten's massive and moving War Requiem to Carnegie Hall. Britten, a staunch pacifist, wrote the piece in 1961 for the re-consecration of England's 14th-century Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed in World War II.

In this Requiem, Spano says "Britten invites us to contemplate, with him, both our humanity and our capacity for compassion and our need to grieve and mourn and honor our dead; along with the opportunity to self-scrutinize and to reflect on our capacity to be inhuman."

Moments before the music begins, Robert Spano greets the Atlanta Symphony Concertmaster David Coucheron (left) and soloists, tenor Thomas Cooley and baritone Stephen Powell (right).

Melanie Burford
/ for NPR Music

Originally published on October 29, 2015 11:02 am

Conductor Robert Spano leads the orchestra and chorus in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, music written for the 1962 rededication of the cathedral in Coventry, England, destroyed in a 1940 air raid.

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